“... cannot let England down. If he was to confess he would be failing his family, the British Queen, Margaret Thatcher, the Queen’s Guards, the majors, the brigadiers – yes, the whole British Empire.’ For a manipulative police inspector, a public prosecutor on the make, and a national press eager for evidence of British – if not downright ...”

“... and passionate. Fiercely opposed to the Falklands and Gulf Wars, unceasing in its criticism of Margaret Thatcher and all her ways, uncompromising in its refusal to accede one jot to the culture of slick presentation and the sound bite, the London Review of Books has contrived to sit squarely across and against the grain of the decade through which ...”

“... as the only alternative to poverty or starvation. I sympathise with the position of those (like Margaret Thatcher) who, faced with the loss of sovereignty, wish to get off the EMU train altogether. I also sympathise with those who seek integration under the jurisdiction of some kind of federal constitution with a federal budget very much larger than ...”

“... see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has allowed an insurance company to take over and manage a large part of the town’s shopping centre. In the interests of ‘safety’, this company now patrols the area with security ...”

“... ultimate vindication, however, came with the advent of the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.’ Roger Scruton, by contrast, is writing in a different register in Enoch at 100 when he laments the loss of ‘philosophical acumen’ that led to the anti-socialist truths of the free market being reiterated ‘far less ...”

“... in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna, Margaret Thatcher, clearly earned that title in the century’s second half. No one can doubt the extent to which Thatcher stamped herself on the 1980s, but the effect of reading this fine biography is to make one ...”

“... of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in 1951. Harman became the Labour parliamentary candidate for Peckham in 1982 and that summer got ...”

“... of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964. He ends in 1981 with the ‘drying-out of the wets’ by Mrs Thatcher in her autumn reshuffle. The underlying theme, if only a whisper in the reader’s ear, is plain enough: the erosion of the post-war state, the collapse of consensus politics, the descent of Labour into the abyss. Or to sum it all up – decline and ...”

“... sketching them, having discovered a talent for making likenesses. The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Archbishop Makarios and Adolf Eichmann all sat for portraits. He was an invitee at all the fashionable parties, and a man who specialised in providing fun for his friends. Keeler met him when she was a showgirl and moved into his ...”

“... for Expansion, presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Education and Science (Mrs Margaret Thatcher), December 1972. I do not think that irrevocable damage has yet been done, but I do regard the situation as alarming in the sense that the contribution made by Britain to world science will be severely reduced if the factors now operating ...”

“... a determined advocate in principle’) when it showed no sign of being thus qualified at the time. Margaret Thatcher, as Major points out, has been a great deal less honest. In 1985 she had forced through the Single European Act, which committed Britain to ‘progressive realisation of economic and monetary union’, but later decided that she had always ...”

“... the scene doesn’t become clear until page four, when the first of the main characters arrives: Margaret Thatcher, apparently a regular visitor to the park, now a ghost of her former self. The ‘heightened reality of the “Iron Lady”, scourge of the trade unions, victor of the Falklands War, the best man in the cabinet’ has dissipated. She ...”

“... Major was struggling to get his foot on the ladder – any ladder – at an age when Heath and Thatcher had already made good their escape by scrambling onto the upward escalator at Oxford University. Not until Major landed a job with the Standard Bank in 1966, aged 23, did his prospects start to improve. ‘I reckoned I could then save a hundred pounds a ...”

“... Whoever thought otherwise? The popular answer is that this was the general proposition asserted by Margaret Thatcher when she uttered this phrase – which, once uttered, she was never allowed to forget. Like many famous quotations, it has been snatched out of its original context. The fact is that in an interview with Woman’s Own in October 1987, ...”

“... Macmillan’s bloodstained reshuffle of 1963, the Night of the Long Knives (contrasted with Mrs Thatcher’s ten-year extravenous drip), with an airy flap of the wrist and one and a quarter pages. Such matters are unworthy, not to be bothered with. Like German culture, they rate a shrug and a giggle. But there are elements in this unsatisfactory book which ...”